The fate of City of Heroes: NCsoft Responds to Fans

Last month we reported the sad news concerning NCsoft’s decision to shut City of Heroes down. Since then fans have rallied together and shown NCsoft by way of letters, organized events (including the video above), and even a fundraiser that they aren’t quite ready for Paragon City to go dark.

Fans have been optimistic, hoping that the overwhelming support from the community would help push NCsoft into figuring out some way for the MMO to survive. Well news has just come from NCsoft and unfortunately it doesn’t look good. In the letter the company says the following:

“We wanted to let you know that your voices have been heard and your concerns have been taken into serious consideration. We appreciate the overwhelmingly constructive and positive messages in the emails, notes, and packages you’ve sent in support of the game. It has not been an easy decision for us to close Paragon Studios and prepare to shut down City of Heroes. We’ve exhausted all options including the selling of the studio and the rights to the City of Heroes intellectual property, but in the end, efforts to do so were not successful. City of Heroes has a special place in all of our hearts, and we want to ensure its reputation and the memories we share for the game end on a high note.”

“Once again, we will be holding events throughout the process of preparing for the game’s end, and we encourage players and fans of the franchise to join forces and enjoy their time in a game that we’ve enjoyed supporting for more than eight years.”

Well bummer.

It is interesting to see that NCsoft has actually pursued several options for keeping the MMO and its community alive, including selling the rights to City of Heroes. So it’s saddening to see that despite all the seemingly good intentions from both sides that THIS is how it ends, with the MMO still on schedule to be closed for good in November. However I don’t think anyone could have asked for a better response and effort from the community and certainly no one is ever going to dispute the dedication fans of the MMO have shown.

28 Readers Commented

this is what fks me up….if ur going to shut down anyway why are you trying to sell the rights…give the game to another studio……sure they might make money from it but ur going to throw it out anyway :0/… could probably even write up a contract where you get 10% of profits for the next 5 years or so….i dont even play the game and i think this is a load of crap….i was considering playing it a bit in the future..who knew it would shut down b4 i got back to it

Wow this was the game that got me into PC gaming…this was the start for me. In this game i was know as V-To A willpower duel swords tank. I had a lot of fun playing this game for 5 years every night with my bro 4 states away from me. Made A-lot of good friends on there. While i currently no longer play it i got on for this event…I supported them and Strongly wanted the game to keep going as i wanted to return to it once again and Play with other’s DC or Champions are not the same i tried them both and disliked them.
CoH WILL be highly missed along with all my friends and Toons i made on the game.
almost brings a tear to my eye seeing such a good game die the game that started it all for me.
Great Run and So long we will meet once again !

Unfortunately, I have to say that as a COH player, several reasons lead me to believe that this video was made my NCsoft and not actual normal members of COH. First off, the chance of everyone standing perfectly still without some jerk trying to ruin things is almost impossible, so it was likely made by just a few staff members and not one person for each character as it appears. Secondly, I’m pretty dang sure that this many people can’t be in the same instance of Atlas Park(the area in the video) at the same time. Last I checked, each area can only hold a maximum of like…50 members. There appears to be thousands here. City of Heroes actually has multiple instances of each game area per server. I remember several times that they had 3 different Atlas parks open at once on the server I played on, and there was nowhere near this number of people there. The video is obviously faked.

It’s REALLY hard to get a lot of people together in an mmo for an event..even with the devs help. Especially to get them to all hold still for a video. The amount of people in this video is just outstanding..it’s sad it’s still getting shut down.

you don’t know what you missed out on then. I ended up playing this game after they (NCSoft) Shut down exteel they gave me a code for 1-month free I never redeem the code till like a year later after the game went free to play ended up giving me VIP for free for 1 month when it ran out I bought another month of VIP because the game was really fun very in-depth character customization system. Anyways CoH was hugely skill based combat I had like 10 skill bars for skills on a level 43 minion master (10 skills per bar) this class was VIP class or if u decided to go free to play had to buy the class or earn it through the “paragon reward system” Either of 3 was a still pay for archetype class which was np was more than worth it MMs were good solo class im more of a lone wolf player. To be honest it’s sad to see this game go I had took a break like I do in all MMOs and was just about ready to return when I got an email from MMO-bomb on CoH’s closure I was bit sad because this was an amazing game for it’s age. I decided to go back and enjoy the last 2 months of it I logged in last night created me a new MM just to relive it one last time as a solo player. I will deeply miss this game when it’s gone but hey that’s life everything dies including games.

Yeah, iam sad that i dint played this game before, looks like a great community, and that is something that i never found on a MMO today.But, you know what game the community is going to move?My guess is CO, since its also from Cryptic.

Actually yes and no.
It’s all a matter of right and time. You can own your own private server, for easy exemple WoW, as long you own the right to. It depend of the law of your country.
Like one of the french private server, they bought the right to use WoW regarding the french law and so they are allowed. Blizzard is aware of it and especially made some request to the owners in regards of the extension ect to not have them up right after they are live on officials server.
Outside of this case, most mmo do not care much of private server, there used to be a time when they were hunted but it’s over now.

Now that’s a community, absolutely not made of un-mature people, but of serious players/roleplayers, seeing this game end will sure be sad news, but there is always a tomorrow, and they will never forget what this game meant, from levels and fun to new relationships estabilished, this game was more than an MMO, it was The MMO, let’s hope the community stays together and finds another mmo like this one.